As computer networks have spread, electronic commerce or e-commerce has been widely used. Many Web sites providing e-commerce services provide users visiting their sites (site users) with recommended information on products or services on Web pages. The sites may also provide recommended information by delivering e-mails describing the recommended information on products or services to registered members.
Heretofore, this type of recommended information was generated on the basis of product purchase histories or service use histories of site users. As a simple example, if two or more site users have purchased the same product, each of these site users may be presented information on a different product purchased by another or the other site users. Another example for providing site users with more accurate information is described in Japanese Published Patent Application 2001-229285, in which site users are divided into groups on the basis of their product purchase trends, and recommended information is generated on the basis of histories of selling products to each group and communicated to members of that group. In this case, various statistical analysis methods including data mining may be used to generate recommended information from histories of selling to that group. In the method of generating recommended information on the basis of product purchase histories or service use histories of site users, it is possible to provide recommended information on products or services which are expected to be wanted by the site users by determining site users' preferences through the product purchase histories or the service use histories.
Also, recommended information is provided by a campaign for advertising products or services, or information on products relating to a product which an intending purchaser wants to purchase is provided to the intending purchaser. The recommended information is generated according to provider's hope, that is, what kind of products or services the provider wants to provide.
As stated above, since the generation of recommended information to be provided via a network needs product sales histories or service use histories, it is often performed in batch processing after storing such history information. In other words, recommended information on a certain product cannot be provided until the product and related products have been sold and a certain amount of data has been stored. For this reason, recommended information on a new product or service can be provided to users only after a certain period of time has passed.
Furthermore, in the prior art, since recommended information is generated on the basis of product sales histories or service use histories, there is a need for information management of product sales histories and service use histories at a site providing products or services. Therefore, a load on a server increases.
Still further, generating and providing recommended information on all of sold products and used services leads to providing site users with a huge volume of recommended information, which is impractical.
If information on a specific product (for example, a campaign product) is provided intentionally as recommended information, the recommended information is generated independently of product sales histories or service use histories, thereby reducing a time delay or load on a server in information management. However, since it is based on a provider's intention to provide which product or service information to which user, site users' preferences, tastes, attributes, and other user trends cannot be reflected on the recommended information and thus it is not always provided to appropriate users (potential customers likely to purchase the product or to use the service).